


Why We Fight at Night (and How We Stay Alive)

by iliveinfantasies



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Angry!Johanna, Angst, District 7, F/F, Hunger Games, Johanna - Freeform, Joniss - Freeform, Post-Mockingjay, katanna, katniss - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 15:26:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5253365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iliveinfantasies/pseuds/iliveinfantasies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way Johanna sees her life with Katniss after the war ends.</p><p>Post-Mockingjay. Johanna POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why We Fight at Night (and How We Stay Alive)

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is, but it pressed itself into my skull some time between 4 am and my alarm, and wouldn't stop. So here it is. Also, this is angsty, guys. Just letting you all know. That being said, I have a hard time with super!fluff with these two, because that's just now how their characters are. 
> 
> Warnings: Johanna's internal monologue, so more swearing, like she does. Mentions of sex, sort of.

There are some evenings that I look at her, and I can just sense her mind sparking into action, thinking of things that were thought to be in the spirit of and I can tell, just fucking tell, that it’s going to be one of those nights. It’s to be expected, I suppose, after all this time, like when I watch her come in from her silent space in the woods and realize that she’s been here the whole time, she hasn’t gone any fucking place at all, except that dead space inside her mind, stuck between clarity and once-upon-a-fucking-time illusion.

It’s like she doesn’t quite know anymore, just can’t quite feel the extent to which she’s broken, and that’s just a little too fucking beautiful for words. But I can see it in the way she watches me sometimes, makes sure to look straight in my eyes when she runs the calloused pads of her fingertips over the raised scars on my ribs smooth like water, oh isn’t THAT ironic?. She doesn’t I don’t we don’t really give a fuck, but it’s happening, now, and it’s stunning, and it’s all that fucking matters. Often on colder nights (like this one oh please oh please it’s just too fucking cold please) we come together in a clash of sweating bodies, moving straight from nightmare-sweat to comfort-sweat and every fucking thing in between, sweet and solid and shut up, brainless, and just fucking feel.

Sometimes it’s not even that, sometimes (because we all know the world is different at night, when you’re seeing upside down) it’s a sharp tang, a sweet clarity, the sharp prick of a morphling needle pushed under skin and a bundle of pine needles pressed into dirty cloth and hidden between the sheets.

We really do it because we need it, now, and even then only to survive. We kick back into ourselves as we were back then, your younger eyes, fucking killing and bleeding and massacring our own selves through each other’s eyes like we should have done. We do it not to satisfy any one thing, really, but because the nightmares will fucking come and it’s the only way we can kill each other in the dark, just a little bit more each time, without truly dying. And it kills us, it fucking kills us, just a little bit, just a bit more every fucking time, but oh fuck we fucking need it.

We need to feel that adrenaline rush and the force of power, the sharp tearing of skin over our bones, need to realize that we once again have blood caking under our fingernails. We’re a series of one-night stands, a perpetual presence in more than one bed, but not for pleasure, never for that. We don’t fucking deserve that like we deserve to hurt, and she fucking knows it. It’s not to kiss the dreams from beneath our lashes or fix each other on the pretense of sleep, but because it’s the only way to get through those nights (and I said it was one, remember, didn’t I fucking call it?) and still be there to breathe a little in the morning.

Because I see it from her, too, see it in the freckles in her eyes those times that I peek in and try to make constellations (which, by the way, what a bunch of bullshit). Because we both have the same fucking fear, the thought that maybe one day she will finally shoot that arrow into the fucking sun, drag herself up by her rumple-bent wings and fly, fly, fly away Mockingjay. Then we remember that on those nights, it’s all a great big fucking dream, another grey-clouded sky, more rain on the windowpanes makingmescream and I’ll be here, and she’ll see me, and we’ll both hold on to our own favorite illusions, crisp and bitter and bold; our own private fucking dysfunctions.


End file.
